Populist in chief needs a movement

Struggling to explain the current wave of voter discontent, journalists have once again discovered a “new” populism.

Angry Americans, reporters note, now seem more likely to rail against Big Government than against Big Business.

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They are said to regard the rising deficit with a loathing their ancestors once directed at haughty tycoons and tax-sheltered yachtsmen. The Ivy League pedigree of virtually all current Supreme Court justices also supposedly rankles the ordinary American, who has not graduated from a four-year college, much less one reserved for the wonkish and well-to-do.

The “only viable brand of populism” today, writes Matt Bai in The New York Times, is “about the individual versus the institution — not only business but also the government and large media and elite universities, too.”

Let’s pause here for a little historical perspective. There is nothing particularly novel about this kind of anti-elitist fury or those who try to channel it for their own political ends. Since Andrew Jackson killed off the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s, by charging it was a public monopoly that enriched only the privileged few, including some “foreigners,” opposition to federal largesse has often had a populist flavor.

The national government, mused Jackson, should be “void of pomp, protecting all and granting favors to none, dispensing its blessings, like the dews of Heaven, unseen and unfelt save in the freshness and bounty they contribute to produce.”

It’s an impossible fantasy — but one that has seduced countless Americans over the past two centuries.

During the Gilded Age, the original Populists did reverse the stance, arguing that only a powerful state could help “the plain people” stand up to robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, whose firms were worth more than the entire federal budget.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt kept up the drumroll during the Great Depression, with attacks on “economic royalists” that made moguls like the du Ponts seem anti-American.

But after World War II, the anti-government strain of populism came roaring back, and it has never really been absent since. Joe McCarthy blasted as traitors “the bright young men” in the State Department “who are born with silver spoons in their mouths.”

Similar gibes against “twisted-thinking,” left-wing professors helped launch a conservative movement that accused patronizing liberals in the federal bureaucracy and media of believing they knew what was best for ordinary Americans.

In 1963, Gov. George Wallace stood at the entrance to a building at the University of Alabama to make a symbolic protest against the Kennedy administration’s order to integrate the state’s premier educational institution. His statement to the cameras could be made at any tea party rally today: “There can be no submission to the theory that the central government is anything but the servant of the people.”